6 comments:

I guess I'm a glutton for punishment, because I'm about to ask a question which I know you're not going to like. Why is bias in the professoriate a problem? I can understand it being a problem in K-12, where students are young and impressionable. But shouldn't college students be aware that human beings are all biased in some way or another and that we filter our views of the world through that bias? Shouldn't they be capable of sorting out the facts for themselves at that age?

It's a problem because there's very little recourse for a student who's punished by the professor for not kowtowing to the professor's belief structure. I suffered this myself in my CLAD (cross-cultural, language, and academic development) coursework, but the instructor in question probably decided that giving me the grade I'd earned was easier than the hassle of continuing to harass me.

Here's the problem with bias, if a professor is only open to one point of view, then by definition he is limited discussion on other possibilities. What if we only had one solution for cancer? What if we only had one solution for alternative fuels? So if students need to be driven by the need to solve problems at all cost, then limiting it to the narrow confines of one professor's bias will limit the results and possibly cause us to overlook better solutions to common problems. To my mind, at the college level, professors should be more open to diverse opinions, not less. But from what I have experienced and what my kids have experienced, some disciplines are more prone to bias than others. Journalism is high on that score, as is Poli Sci, History, Literature and any discipline that ends with the word "studies".

A summary of what you said. The college professorate suffers from a collective narrowness of mine. And they should be more open to “diversity” of opinion. Especially when they like to lecture others on “tolerance”.